Occupants Unknown

I’m sitting on crumbling concrete steps in an alley when the two women with their dog stroll by. The women are young and fit—twenties, I’d say; gay, I’d guess. One of them wears her newsboy cap backwards. I rush to stand, spilling from my lap the notebook and enumerator forms and census bag. With all that stuff, not to mention a full-sized umbrella hooked over my forearm, there’s nowhere to put my pencil except doggie-bone style in my mouth. I remove it to speak to them.

“Hello,” I call out. “I’m Nancy from the U.S. Census Bureau.” I recite verbatim from the first question in the census questionnaire, just as we were instructed. Hello. I’m (Name) from the U.S. Census Bureau. (Show I.D.) Is this (Address)?

The crumbling steps where I’ve been sitting belong to a house balkanized into tiny dark abodes. After knocking on the proper front door for Apartments A and B (bad girl B hadn’t returned her census form), I swung round to the alley-side apartment (bad boy C!), then followed the weeds and gravel to a fourth apartment, this one a doored garage identified on my list as a ½—a profit-making afterthought. Three out of four in this housing unit had not returned their census forms.

The outline of a number haunted the doorframe of the garage. Really, somebody lived here? I wasn’t buying it. A small outdoor grill lay forgotten on the pathway, puddled with orangish water. It looked like a scrap dealer’s idea of a punch bowl. The grill’s equivalent in postal delivery protruded from the mailbox—damp, smelly circulars and occupant envelopes. I went back to the alley and sat on some steps to write down my Record of Contact and Outcome: LV, I checked off, Left Notice of Visit. Three more HUs (housing units). Three more strike-outs. Nobody lives here, I’m thinking.

Then the two women walk by.

I can use them as Proxy to verify the vacancy. My first score of the day.

The women’s dog is quiet and unleashed. He doesn’t move to sniff me as I move toward them and thumb out the I.D. tag hanging from my neck. It’s all overkill. They are young and fearlessly living in an urban neighborhood and probably gay and besides, one of them is parading her newsboy cap backwards. I’m white, middle-aged, wearing my schoolteacher eyeglasses (nice touch, I’d actually thought to myself), and looking however a schoolmarmish white middle-aged woman looks during her first day of enumeration when after six hours in the off and on drizzle, she has failed to complete a form for a single person, single in this case meaning uno, the number one, as opposed to the solo state of occupancy as explained in Section 5-2 of the d-547, 2010 NRFU Enumerator Manual. (In class we called it the d-547 for short. It’s a good thing the government never attempted a dictionary. We’d all have to rent storage units to house its volumes and still never have anything past accordion.)

Oh no, the women assure me. Somebody lives there. B parks her car right in the alley. She’s not supposed to but she does. She’s hardly ever there. C’s around.

“But that garage unit must be vacant,” I say.

“No,” the newsboy hat woman corrects. “A guy lives there. He works.”

“But it’s Sunday.”

“He’s usually there.”

Usually there but never gets his mail? Usually there but never bothers to kick the grill out of the way?

It could have been so easy. What looms ahead instead is over a week of looping around and around to catch an occupant at home. I don’t know this at the time, but I can guess it. Already the HUs are distinguishing themselves into types. This housing unit type says either young and oblivious, or older and irresponsible. Slovenly landlord thrown in.

I ask about the house across the street. They don...